Comparing General-Purpose and Domain-Specific Languages: An Empirical Study

Computer Science and Information Systems

Marjan Mernik¹  Tomaž Kosar²  Nuno Oliveira³ 

[1] Polytechnic Institute of Bragança;University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science;University of Minho - Department of Computer Science

关键词: domain-specific languages;    general-purpose languages;    program comprehension;    empirical software engineering;   

DOI  :  10.2298/CSIS1002247K

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Computer Science and Information Systems

【 摘 要 】

Many domain-specific languages, that try to bring feasible alternatives for existing solutions, with a purpose to simplify programmers work, have come up in recent years, Although, these little languages seem to be easy to use, there is an open issue whether they bring advantages in comparison to the application libraries, which are the most commonly used implementation approach. In this work, we present an experiment, which was carried out to compare such a domain-specific language with a comparable application library. The experiment was conducted with 36 programmers, who have answered a questionnaire on both implementation approaches. The questionnaire runs on more than 100 pages. For a domain-specific language and the application library, the same problem domain has been used – construction of graphical user interfaces. In terms of a domain-specific language, XAML has been used and C# Forms for the application library. A cognitive dimension framework has been used for a comparison between XAML and C# Forms.

【 授权许可】

CC BY-NC-ND